"That was not the case in the '60s when the Rat Pack was there," Jillette, 59, said over the phone from Vegas earlier this week. "People visited because you've got Sinatra, Louis Prima and the best comics in the world. But then in the '70s, around the time of fat Elvis, people started to accept it as a tacky place and by the '80s it was just ironic."

But when Penn & Teller, whose illusion-based stage act is synonymous with subversive, irreverent humor, decided to decamp from New York City to Vegas in 1993, they unintentionally joined a wave of artists and entertainers who were remaking Vegas into the legitimate (if still tourist-driven) cultural destination it is today.

"We got the sense that people were getting sick of coming (to Vegas) to make fun of things," said Jillette, who will perform on April 18 at Greeley's Union Colony Civic Center as part of Penn & Teller's first Colorado show in 18 years. "I in no way believed it was because of us, but I did convince Blue Man Group to come out there. And then it was the '90s so of course you had Cirque (du Soleil) coming out and all the good chefs."

The story of Penn & Teller is woven throughout popular culture's larger history of the last few decades. The duo, composed of the portly, theatrical Penn (the ringmaster/skeptic) and the silent, inscrutable Teller (the straight man/hapless guinea pig) has been practicing its magic on TV specials and late-night talk shows, in movies and books, and on stages around the world since 1975.

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But their favorite stage is at the Rio hotel and casino in Las Vegas, in a theater named after them. They have performed there happily for 12 years to about a quarter of a million people annually, peddling their magic "involving knives, guns, fire, a gorilla and a showgirl" to whoever fills a seat — often repeat customers.

"We have a rather big following that comes in every single year, whether they're here for conventions or just coming to smoke cigars and get hookers," said Jillette, who's also known for his unvarnished interviews. "But I cannot underestimate how much the owners of the casino care about us. They don't even know our names. They just want to know if there's X-number of people in there per night."

So is that a bad thing?

"I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying it's the greatest thing possible. It's that amount of respect and trust you have for the babysitter that you don't have to worry about every half hour.

"Once a year, one of the people who would be considered our boss comes to the show with a nephew and says, 'It's going great, man!' And that's it. When I was 16 and maybe hoped to someday do a show, it's the way I imagined it. That's not the way theater works anywhere else in the world."

Penn & Teller's freedom — which includes not having to run new segments or ideas by a producer, controlling their own budget, and "hiring our own bosses" — allows them to infuse 20 minutes of new material into their Vegas act per year.

That may not sound like much, but considering that some Vegas shows have remained the same for decades it's just more incentive for fans to come back year after year.

"We keep discovering our audience will stay with us so we can do crazy smart stuff and the audience will dig it," Jillette said. "Whereas everybody else putting together a Vegas show is trying to guess what the audience will like from another city, since no one really creates shows here. There's no hands-on playing and learning, so we're pretty much the only ones taking advantage of what's an incredibly useful artistic situation."

John Wenzel: 303-954-1642, jwenzel@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnwenzel

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